Happy New Years Eve! I hope you and your family have had a wonderful Christmas season and are ready to ring in the New Year.

2017 has been a tremendous year for our family.

We started our family. Emryn is 5 weeks old as of yesterday. Time flying by has never meant like this before.

Jaclyn completed her first full year of practice as a registered dietitian.

We spent our first full year in our new home, which brings with it a wide range of ups and downs. Admittedly, I still haven’t finished all the unpacking.

There’s more than major accomplishments though — an entire year under our (our as in the collective “our”) belts makes us more knowledgeable, independent, and wise. I believe 2017 has carefully taught us to increase our skepticism and to be diligently aware of our own understanding of a situation. Thinking before we speak has never been a more important skill.

Jaclyn is adamantly against New Years Resolutions — in the dietetic world, resolutions rarely turn into habits. So with that said, I’m out to prove her wrong with my New Years resolutions for 2018.

Read my Bible, at least considerably more often. My goal is to make it a daily habit, some time around breakfast each morning.

Begin a close-to-daily fitness regiment. I read somewhere fitness 4 hours or less before bed is a bad idea, so I’ll try to make this a morning habit as well.

Save less. This may sound anti-run-of-the-mill advice, but hear me out. In the first years of your post-high-school life, you save money to pay for university/college, to pay for your wedding, to pay for your travel, to buy a house, and to have children. We’ve checked off a lot of those achievements, so saving now encompasses saving for our children’s education, our own retirement, and other personal goals. Along the way, life happens. My 2018 New Years resolution is to allow life to happen and to not be afraid to spend money on life.

Fortunately, that last resolution should be easily achievable — I could run out and burn a few wads of $100 bills on photography kit in no time.

But overall, I think the list is sufficiently difficult and sufficiently achievable. I’ll report back this time next year.

There will be more than a few year-end roundups today, so it’ll be an odd Sunday where there is more to read than we can handle. Hopefully this doesn’t make the situation worse. Grab a hot cup of coffee — and throw in some Bailey’s… it is New Years Eve after all — and enjoy the reads and sights.